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  • Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England
  • David Griffith
Jessica Brantley. Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. xviii, 463. $45.00.

This book is the first detailed study of London, British Library MS Additional 37049, a densely illustrated mid- to late fifteenth-century compendium of Middle English texts with, most probably, Carthusian origins. That such an important manuscript has had to wait so long for in-depth analysis is a mark of its verbal and visual complexity, the preponderance of short and noncanonical texts among its 101 items, and the relatively unfashionable status of Carthusian studies. Reading in the Wilderness is an attractive headline for such a volume—an indication of the eremitical content and perhaps of the critic’s labors—though the ambitiously phrased subtitle suggests a range and depth that the study of a single codex can hardly hope to achieve. [End Page 304]

The pictorial and diagrammatic elements of MS Additional 37049 are well known, largely as a result of James Hogg’s 1981 edition of the images. The subject of Brantley’s sustained and at times compelling exploration is the scope and significance of the interplay of its verbal and visual representation. Her central argument, laid out in considerable detail in the opening two chapters, is that the manuscript embodies and shapes Carthusian meditative practice in a process of sustained reading and looking that is essentially the enactment of scripture and liturgy, a kind of devotional drama. The semantics of such terms as play and pageant are turned over in the exploration of this almost ritualized response, but the key notion is that the worship generated by this lectio divina, visio divina has a performative quality. To describe this indivisibility of picture and word, Brantley eschews standard hierarchical descriptions of such complexes (label, caption, illustration, picture) in favor of the term “imagetext,” drawn from the work of visual theorist W. J. T. Mitchell.

Key to understanding Brantley’s notion of performative devotion is her discussion of the Desert of Religion (chapter 3) and the large number of lyrics spread throughout the manuscript (chapter 4). The Desert of Religion, it is argued, stands at the heart of the reading experience of the whole volume with the reader’s performance emerging through personal identification with images of adoring or meditating Carthusians. This work is the only Middle English text to have been invariably illustrated (85) and here “attests to its creator’s interest in a fully composite art: the joining of picture and word to create a new, independent medium” (79); “it is not really separable from the manuscript’s concerns, the physical structure, or the textual history of the rest of the manuscript” (118). Through close reading of the poem, comparative analysis with lavishly illustrated versions in British Library, MS Cotton Faustina B. vi (Pt II) and British Library, MS Stowe 39, and extended reference to Richard Rolle, Brantley contends that this poem’s landscapes “introduce an eremetic community into the mystic’s solitary devotional practice and model visionary experience in the desert” (97). The manuscript’s interest in the short poems explores the “visual inheritance” of the meditative lyric (125) and allows the reader to position himself as the subject of the first-person texts. In these ways the reader acts out these meditative lyrics as they take up “performative modes of both authorial and readerly kinds” (123).

The notion of the reader as performer generates considerable interpretive [End Page 305] possibilities, though occasionally the force of the argument diminishes in the face of such inquiry and some of the more obvious points of connection are only briefly addressed. Thus, speculation as to the identity of the non-Carthusian figures in the illustrations is collapsed into the possibility that “the monks seem so tantalizingly to represent the readers who were using it” (156). So, too, the workings of the meditative lyric beyond the immediate monastic context are largely passed over. Further, the appearance of numerous “imagetext” complexes in parish churches are referenced through standard examples such as the Pricke of Conscience window at All...

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